Multimedia

The CGD and Social Finance Development Impact Bonds Working Group is designing a new type of investment vehicle to attract private investors who want to do good and do well while delivering development outcomes. My guests this week are two of the group’s three co-chairs: Elizabeth Littlefield, President and CEO of the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation; and Toby Eccles, founder and Development Director at Social Finance, a UK-based non-profit that has pioneered a similar investment vehicle, the Social Impact Bond or SIB.

I recently spoke with Elizabeth and Toby following the working group’s second meeting here in Washington. Owen Barder, the third co-chair, joined the meeting via video link from London and did not join us for the Wonkcast.

Being able to prove who you are is a powerful tool that can serve as a basis for exercising rights like voting, accessing financial services and receiving transfers, and reducing fraud. Yet billions of people in the developing world lack a means to officially identify themselves. In this week’s Wonkcast, Alan Gelb and Julia Clark draw from their ongoing research on biometric technology and development to explain how developing country governments and donors can tap advances in biometrics to help empower poor people.

In this episode, Owen talks with author and economist Diane Coyle about her latest book ‘The Economics Of Enough, How To Run The Economy As If The Future Matters’.

Diane shares her thoughts on economic growth as a satisfactory goal for economic and social policy, and discusses the measure of Gross Domestic Product in relation to indicators of happiness and welfare. She also explains her ‘manifesto for enough’ in relation to how it addresses these issues, along with how much it leaves unresolved.

Development Drums is hosted by Owen Barder and produced by Anna Scott at the Center for Global Development in Europe.

In this CNN interview Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez argued that the Fed's recently announced expansionary monetary policy (QE3) is a response to the lack of action by the US Government and Congress to solve the real problem facing the US: the country's fiscal and debt positions. While not ideal, the Fed's policy is an attempt to improve consumers' expectations who have become highly risk adverse in the face of large uncertainties both in Europe and in the US.
Liliana explained that, in contrast to events in 2010, this time around the effects of the Fed's policies will have less adverse effects on Latin America and other Emerging Market Economies. The central reason is that these countries' current economic cycle is one characterized by declining economic growth resulting from a reduced global demand for their products. This in turn is the result of a global slowdown that includes advanced economies and China. In Liliana's view, to the extent that the Fed's actions can improve markets' confidence, the positive effect--however limited--on US aggregate demand will offset the adverse effects on currency appreciations in Latin America and other economies.

This Wonkcast was originally recorded in February 2011. Andy Sumner updates the data from the original Bottom Billion brief in his recent working paper, Where Will the World's Poor Live? An Update on Global Poverty and the New Bottom Billion.

Paul Collier’s 2007 book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, changed the way we think about poverty and development. Collier argued that the majority of the 5-billion people in the "developing world" live in countries with sustained high growth rates and would eventually escape from poverty. The rest—the bottom billion—live in 58 small, poor, often land-locked countries that are growing very slowly or not at all. These countries, stuck in poverty traps, should be the focus of foreign aid, Collier argued.

Your tax dollars bought that bridge, that road, that school. But unless you live in Colombia or the UK, you probably can’t look at the contracts for these things bought on your behalf. My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is Charles Kenny, senior fellow here at CGD and we are discussing his latest work: “Publish What You Buy: The Case for Routine Publication of Government Contracts.”

In this austere budget climate, generating “value for money” (VFM) is a top concern for global health funding agencies and their donors, who want the biggest bang for their buck in terms of lives saved and diseases controlled. To this end, CGD has convened a working group to help shape the VFM agenda for global health funding agencies, with a particular focus on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Leading these efforts is my guest this week, Amanda Glassman, a senior fellow and director of the global health policy program at the Center for Global Development.

Electric power has been restored across northern India to the 600 million people who recently found themselves sweltering in the dark. But the massive blackouts have left lingering questions about the country’s ability to provide the infrastructure necessary to sustained growth and poverty reduction.

CGD Fellow Arvind Subramanian puts the blame on populism—a tendency of politicians to promise free or heavily subsidized electricity and officials to turn a blind eye to power theft—that has left India with an undercapitalized, inefficient power sector that has much higher transmission and distribution losses than other countries at a similar level of development.